Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States, 1790–1865

6 Science, Mechanicians, and Invention

c h a p t e r ฀ s i x Science, Mechanicians, and Invention Even before independence, Americans recognized the promise of scientific knowledge for useful purposes. They understood that craft knowledge was basically different from knowledge of mechanized industry and that the crafts were unlikely to generate such knowledge by themselves. Like their Enlightenment counterparts in Europe, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson expected that science, construed broadly enough to include virtually all knowledge of natural regularities, could find great practical significance. But science had to be nurtured by governments and society. On its own invention would develop slowly with frequent setbacks or would languish altogether.Although disagreeing about specifics, leaders sought to develop and disseminate science, encourage education , foster the press, and form a patent system designed to stimulate invention. Later political and civil leaders followed in each track. The hoped-for result was the flourishing of science and the scientifically trained industrial practitioner, who could translate science into innovation. Such practitioners—or mechanicians, as I have been calling them—developed among engineers and many others. Applied scientists, broadly defined to include those understanding natural regularities and their useful applications in terms of scientific or engineering concepts, formed another technological center. Unlike machinists, applied scientists had many occupations. They could have powerfully stimulated development by overcoming a discontinuity between craft knowledge and the knowledge of the emerging industrial economy. Karl Marx expected such an outcome. He attributed capitalism’s revolutionary character to large-scale mechanized production and argued that science underlay the unprecedented advance of productivity. Capitalism generated factories but also the “modern science of technology” through which innovation supported later innovation when knowledge developed for one use spread to others.1 Capitalist growth thus depended on the development of science. Science, Mechanicians, and Invention 161 The question is whether, and how, mechanicians—and hence science itself —had major significance for technological change in the United States before the Civil War. The answer is hardly evident. Beginning with Samuel Slater, many successful innovations depended little on formal science. The reaper, the wood-planing machine, the power loom, and even the discovery of vulcanization depended more on “empirical” knowledge than on pure science. If scientific training mattered, it was not for all innovations. Moreover, in what contexts did science matter? Did it shape occupations that then operated on their own, or was it of continuing importance? In other words, did science begin an economic process that then developed by its own logic, or was it a resource that practitioners regularly and increasingly utilized? If the former was true, science was a means to support infant industries that later needed no crutch. If the latter was so, then institutions supplying scientific knowledge would become ever more integral to industrial development. Science,as the term was used in the nineteenth century,covered a great variety of knowledge, accessible to different bodies of people and applying differently among inventions. To understand how science supported invention, this chapter surveys the character of science and its multiple roles in technological change in the antebellum United States. Three kinds of innovators put scientific knowledge to use in ways that fostered innovation: some with sustained training in pure science, others with similar training in applied science, and yet others trained less systematically. Each related to parts of the broader scientific community. Together they led the integration of science in economic life. A Philadelphia Story and the Variety of Science In the late 1810s Jacob Perkins’s shop was the center for frequent discussions about topics such as how to harden steel for engraving and other purposes, the sort of problem metalworkers had to confront. Eleven men attended most frequently. Perkins already was a widely recognized inventor of nail-making and banknoteengraving machines and casting and die-sinking methods when he moved from Boston to Philadelphia in 1815.He had been admitted to theAmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences but felt unqualified to be a member. He was joined by Coleman Sellers,a mechanic whose testimony helped Perkins win a patent lawsuit and who became a partner in a fire engine factory, and Coleman’s 10-year-old son, George. Five precision metalworkers could be called mechanics,though their occupations included jewelry, brass engraving, die sinking, clockmaking, instrument making, and coining. Three others were accomplished in science. Robert Patterson was a 162 Technological Centers professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, the director of the U...